It’s official, gang. I’ve just signed a contract with Perfect Crime Books for the publication of — how shall I describe it? It may not be quite as hefty as my book on Cornell Woolrich, whose title I adapted for the titles of these columns, but it will certainly qualify as a literary doorstop.

Back in the 1980s I wanted my Woolrich book to answer almost any imaginable question about the haunted recluse I’ve called the Hitchcock of the written word. Now as I slipslide into senility I want my new book to be just as comprehensive about the two first cousins from Brooklyn who wrote some of the most complex and involuted detective novels of the genre’s golden age.

Are you familiar with everything bagels? This tome will be, I hope, the Everything Book on Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee. Its tentative title is Ellery Queen: The Art of Detection.

I think I heard a question from cyberspace. “Hey, didn’t you do that book already, back in the Watergate era?” Well, sort of. But as I got older I became convinced that I hadn’t done all that good a job.

Fred Dannay was the public face of Ellery Queen, and in the years after we met he became the closest to a grandfather I’ve ever known, but I never really got to know the much more private Manny Lee. He and I had exchanged a few letters, and we met briefly at the Edgars dinner in 1970, but he died before we could meet again.

Because of his untimely death Royal Bloodline inadvertently gave the impression that “Ellery Queen” meant 90% Fred Dannay. One of the most important items on my personal bucket list was to do justice to Manny.

Thanks largely to the memoirs published by his son Rand Lee, and to the Dannay-Lee correspondence (in Blood Relations, published early this year by the same Perfect Crime Books that will issue The Art of Detection), and to the correspondence between Manny and Anthony Boucher, which is archived at Indiana University’s Lilly Library, I’ve come to a much clearer understanding of Manny, of who he was and how he lived and worked and thought.

The Art of Detection improves on Royal Bloodline in all sorts of ways but for me this one is the most important. In addition it provides much more detail on subjects like the EQ radio series (1939-48) and the decades-long interaction between the cousins and Boucher.

And of course it covers all sorts of subjects that postdate the early 1970s, like the EQ TV series with Jim Hutton, and Fred’s third marriage and last years and death. And there will be a number of photographs never seen before.

When I first discovered the Ellery Queen novels, that byline was a household name. It still was when I first met Fred Dannay. I can’t believe that in my lifetime the Queen name has (except in Japan) been so completely forgotten. Maybe, just maybe, with the publication of Blood Relations this year, and of my book next year, and of Jeffrey Marks’ biography-in-progress two or three years from now, I’ll live to see the return of Ellery Queen to the public eye.

***

On June 5, at age 91, Ray Bradbury died. In his own field he was and will remain a giant. As far as I can determine, among the hundreds of authors whose work Anthony Boucher reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle during and for a while after World War II, he was the last one standing.

Reviewing Bradbury’s Dark Carnival collection in his Chronicle column for June 22, 1947, Boucher called the author “the most fascinating and individual talent to appear in the fantasy field for a long time….[T]here’s no telling what may come of this still very young man.”

During his early and middle twenties Bradbury also wrote stories for crime pulps like New Detective, Dime Mystery and Detective Tales. Was Boucher familiar with them?

“For years,” he wrote in his Dark Carnival review, “I have been prowling newsstands and buying any magazine with a Ray Bradbury story.” Observe that that sentence isn’t limited to fantasy-horror magazines.

In any event Boucher was long dead by the time Bradbury’s earliest crime tales were collected in the paperback original A Memory of Murder (Dell, 1984). We know that Bradbury was a great admirer of Cornell Woolrich, and he may well have been the first writer for whose short crime fiction Woolrich was the model and polestar.

Woolrich never once used a series character. After two tales about a character called the Douser — for my money the weakest of the fifteen in the collection — Bradbury followed that lead. He never approached Woolrich’s mastery of pure edge-of-the-chair suspense but, for a kid in his middle twenties, did a noble job creating noir atmosphere Woolrich style.

The more you’re at home in Woolrich, the more you feel a sense of deja vu when you read Bradbury’s stories. “Yesterday I Lived!” (Flynn’s Detective Fiction, August 1944) echoes Woolrich’s “Preview of Death” (Dime Detective, November 15, 1934; collected in Darkness at Dawn, 1985) in the sense that both are about a Hollywood plainclothesman of low rank investigating the death of a lovely actress while she’s filming a scene:

“He went out into the rain. It beat cold on him… Cleve clenched his jaw and looked straight up at the sky and let the night cry on him, all over him, soaking him through and through; in perfect harmony, the night and he and the crying dark.”

In that paragraph and countless others in these stories, it’s obvious whom Bradbury is channeling.

Sometimes Bradbury offers his own take on a Woolrich springboard situation, for example in “It Burns Me Up!” (Dime Mystery, November 1944), which tracks Woolrich’s “If the Dead Could Talk” (Black Mask, February 1943; collected in Dead Man’s Blues, 1947) in that each is narrated in first person by a corpse.

Sometimes there’s an echo even in the titles, for example “Wake for the Living” (Dime Mystery, September 1947), which evokes Woolrich’s classic “Graves for the Living” (Dime Mystery, June 1937; collected in Nightwebs, 1971).

Bradbury’s prose tends to be more shrill and lurid than Woolrich’s, and pockmarked with exclamation points — even in the titles! — as Woolrich’s never was, but the influence is crystal clear.

In his introduction to A Memory of Murder, Bradbury was quite modest about his contribution to our genre:

“I floundered, I thrashed, sometimes I lost, sometimes I won. But I was trying … I hope you will judge kindly, and let me off easy.”

This old jurist has done just that, and urges others who reread these stories to bang their gavels softly.

***

“Sweet, dear, impossible man. I wonder who he’s making love to now. I wish it were me. I have the education and breeding to appreciate a gentleman like he is.”

No one seems to have guessed who wrote those ludicrous lines, supposedly from the viewpoint of an educated woman, that I quoted in my last column.

Maybe that’s because in a sense I was trying to mislead. The malapropisms from Keeler, Avallone, John Ball, William Ard and myself were false clues in the Carr-Christie-Queen manner, playing completely fair with the reader but designed to give the impression that the sixth quotation was by a sixth person.

In fact it wasn’t. The perp, as at least one reader should have figured out, was the ineffable Avallone. Here’s another from the same inexhaustible cornucopia:

“Wolfman Dakota, born of an Apache mother and a Texan rancher, with bronze skin and hot blood in his veins … killed with a weapon unique in crime-land circles. A blowgun filled with poison-tipped darts. A leftover from his Apache heritage….”

Ah yes, who can forget the climax of Stagecoach, with those damn red savages chasing the coach across the salt flats, blowing their poison darts at the Duke and Claire Trevor and all the other passengers?

In 1971 I was actually one of the first teachers to offer a college course in the history and appreciation of detective fiction for credit. Fred Dannay once told me he didn’t understand how I had convinced the powers that be at St. Olaf to allow it. (Simple, there were people on the faculty who enjoyed detective stories and encouraged me.) Manny Lee even sent me a note congratulating me on the course. It arrived one day when I had just completed the day’s class.

Mike’s new Queen book is the best news I’ve seen in a long time. ROYAL BLOODLINE was a superb critical study, but it wasn’t a biography. Twelve years or so ago, I shopped a proposal for a major Queen biography and there were no takers. Since then I’ve sometimes felt I let the side down by not getting it done some way, but Mike’s in a much better position to do it than I, and his book should do something to remind the literary world of the sadly neglected Queen team.

You’re right. The general mystery reading public isn’t reading Ellery Queen now, and there are a lot of factors that go into that.

I know when I started up the most recent version of MYSTERY*FILE in print form, I lost a number of readers from Dorothy-L right away when they saw I was covering old mysteries along with new ones. They weren’t interested, not at all.

So Mike’s book won’t do anything for them, either. But if he can get a publisher interested enough to get the EQ books and short story collections back in print again, that would be a major achievement!

No one seems to have mentioned it in the comments so far, but I found the Cornell Woolrich-Ray Bradbury connection very interesting.

I confess that I’ve never paid much attention to Bradbury’s mystery fiction, having read only a couple of his pulp short stories. It looks like my copy of A MEMORY OF MURDER will go a long way to doing something about that.

To follow up on my comment just before last, although it’s about the lack of interest in old movies today, there was an article in yesterday’s LA TIMES that’s just as relevant about old mystery fiction:

“…find old movies hopelessly passé — technically primitive, politically incorrect, narratively dull, slowly paced. In short, old-fashioned. Even Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man is a Model T next to Andrew Garfield’s rocket ship of a movie. And Model Ts get thrown on the junk heap.”

and

“What this points to is that movies may have become a kind of ‘MacGuffin’ — an excuse for communication along with music, social updates, friends’ romantic complications and the other things young people use to stoke interaction and provide proof that they are in the loop. A film’s intrinsic value may matter less than its ability to be talked about. In any case, old movies clearly cannot serve this community-building function as they once did. More, the immediacy of social networking, a system in which one tweet supplants another every millisecond, militates against anything that is 10 minutes old, much less 10 years. All of this makes it tough not only for old movies to survive but for movie history to matter. There is a sense that if you can’t tweet about it or post a comment about it on your Facebook wall, it has no value. Once, not so long ago, old and new movies, middle-aged audiences and young audiences, happily coexisted. Movies brought us together. Now a chasm widens between the new and the old, one aesthetic and another, one generation and another. It widens until the past recedes into nothingness, leaving us with an endless stream of the very latest with no regard for what came before. Old movies are now like dinosaurs, and like dinosaurs, they are threatened with extinction.”

#11. Sorry, Steve, but I find that opinion article a load of crap. I was studying film in the 70s when few of my generation (born 1954) paid any attention to silent movies, old radio shows, and old music. We danced different and didn’t trust anyone over thirty.

Life is change and every generation likes to think they got it right. But there is no right. There is no more wrong with the kids today then there was when we were the kids and those old people were complaining about us.

How does my rant here apply to Ellery Queen? You can’t blame today’s youth or the changes in today’s society on the fading of Ellery from the masses memories. Remember, the masses rejected the TV series in the 70s, and what decade was it when Ellery made the best seller list?

I am not knocking Ellery Queen, but few characters survive as long as Ellery did. And even fewer span generations without changing (rebooting). The best example of this is Batman, an icon with as many variations as generations who have enjoyed him.

I look forward to reading Mike’s book and learning more about the men behind a character who may not be remembered as much as you’d like, but has left a permanent mark on fiction.

There’s an element of truth in both your opinions. I know that to some of younger people that I talk to, even the 1980s is rather like the Regency period; something so far back in the distant past as to be of no importance. However, when I raised a similar question on a Sherlock Holmes site, a lot of people under 25 responded rather angrily that they were very interested in old books, B&W/Silent Movies etc. There are far too many different groups to easily generalise. I have to say, though, that I look forward to the rather vacuous ‘Millenials’ finding themselves hopelessly adrift as the next generation firmly rejects THEM.

As Bradstreet says there are far too many groups to easily generalize. I understand what Michael is saying but I don’t just dismiss the LA TIMES article as crap. I have children in their thirties and I’ve noticed many of their friends simply do not appreciate or make any attempt to understand that older black and white films can also be excellent. The emphasis on big budget, blockbuster, comicbook hero movies is not a good thing for lovers of quality films. I’ll take a film noir from the forties or fifties every time.

As far as older novels, etc, let me mention what I saw yesterday in a second hand bookstore in Lambertville, NJ. I was with several friends and after having lunch and discussing pulps, we walked to the PHOENIX BOOKSTORE. I noticed a guy in his twenties come in with his girl friend. He was walking around ignoring all the books but staring at his electronic gadget in his hand.

The girl said something to him about reading books and he said, “I don’t have time to read books”. This from a guy who was texting, tweeting, or playing some inane game on his gadget.

I’m afraid we live in a world that is more and more computerized, with people more and more distracted by trivial pursuits such as the latest electronic thing. These activities do not leave much time for reading books.

I should have made my point clearer. The average teenager believes the world began when they were born, but that applies to all generations since humans began.

What made the piece at the LA “Times” crap was the claim my generation was different, that we appreciated the right things, the things of the past and present.

Today they play a game on a gadget, in my day the adults complained about us watching TV or listening to noise we called music. The teenagers in my era spent a comedically amount of time on the telephone or hanging out at some place with other teens. We were not home reading Ellery Queen. Books was something we had to do in school and most were eager to avoid.

Today’s young are just like us but with different gadgets.

I don’t understand the need today to look only at the negative. I don’t understand why texting, writing each other, is so evil versus our teen years with a telephone glued to our ear.

Walker, you talk about younger people who don’t appreciate black and white films. That is not new. Few black and white television series survived on TV in the 70s, yet look at today’s TV. Today’s generation would be appalled by colorization.

The computer is not evil. People hate change. They have seen the end of times with the printing press, the mass paperback, the car, the radio, the silent films, the talking films, the television, and anything new.

Forgive me if this sounds too harsh, but it annoys me that people think if I read a Ellery Queen novel on my Kindle instead of a print book then I am not reading. People are still reading and will never stop. Tastes will change back and forth.

But the world changes no matter what we do. A more interesting question for here is why has Ellery fallen out of favor for decades.

I believe the problem Ellery has is he existed in a era that today is not only dated but unappealing to young people today. The language, the treatment of women and minorities, the hero’s personality and beliefs, or at least the current perception of Ellery, all turn off many of today’s readers.

I can read Ellery and enjoy how it illustrates a time and place now gone, but if I am looking for something to just entertain me with a good who-done-it I would look elsewhere.

Well, I might as well state bluntly that I disagree. Listening to stupid rock and roll and talking on the phone is not the same as the deluge of electronic junk that we are involved in now. The movies were definitely better back then. Then I could see plenty of film noir and westerns in the theater. Not now.

I’ve stopped carrying a cell phone because I don’t want to be distracted while driving or have my wife calling about every dumbo thing that comes up. Alot of people want to talk on the phone about every trivial thing that comes up but I have no interest in small talk.

Tweeting is just about the most trivial thing you can waste time on and Facebook is another waste of time with the one sentence comments, etc. Good for photos however.

I’m going to stop now, at least try to, because my idea of a good time is to read a physical book, watch old movies, and go to Pulpfest and Windy City because I’ve always been first and formost, a reader and collector. I like three beers with dinner also while I’m watching a film noir or western.

I do not like the things that distract alot of people like the i-pad, cell phone, Facebook, and other garbage that seems to be in style in today’s world. Is all this distraction worse than decades ago? I think so and I’ll now board up the door and retire to my reading room. Maybe one of these days I’ll even reread an Ellery Queen novel.

Walker, I like it when you are blunt. It is so much more fun. I have long ago given up trying to change the world, I just want to understand it. Reading other people’s view is as close as I am going to get.

Our point of views are different and we both are not afraid to express those opinions.

This is not the place to go into details, but I have a very low opinion of my past. With my health, my future is limited. That leaves the present for me to be happy.

Enjoy today, Walker. We live in a time of vast choice, where we can live in the past, present or future.

Just to make sure no one would be disappointed, I was careful not to call The Art of Detection a biography. Reportedly Jeff Marks’ book-in-progress will be just that. My modest effort is, as I said in my column (or at least hopes to be), an Everything Book, closer perhaps to First You Dream, Then You Die than to, say, Doug Greene’s bio of John Dickson Carr. There will be more biography than in Bloodline but much else too. I believe The Art of Detection will go deeper and cover more ground than Bloodline. And if I’ve learned anything about writing since the late Sixties when I began Bloodline, the new one will be better written.

“We live in a time of vast choice, where we can live in the past, present or future.”

Amen to that!

We have the Internet to find and obtain old and new books at the click of a finger and multi-region DVD players to be able to watch more movies than one ever could at one time before. We’re in an absolute Golden Age of reading and watching right now.

We’re tilting at windmills if we ever hope to bring Ellery Queen back to household name recognition ever again. It isn’t going to happen. He isn’t going to be updated or reimagined either. That happens to only a few fictional characters, like Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, Batman, Miss Marple, Tarzan — icons that can live past their original generation. But we in the know still have EQ’s books and short stories, the comic books, the radio shows, the games (I have one), the movies. They’re still around, even if the books aren’t in Barnes & Noble and the movies aren’t shown on HBO.

I’m with Walker. I don’t have an ebook reader, and I doubt ever will. I think tweeting is dumb, I’m not on Facebook, and all my cell phone does is send and receive telephone calls. No one I know will send me a text message, because they know I won’t read it. Electronic gadgetry is changing the world and maybe even the brains of those who use it. I can deplore it, but as Michael says, I sure can’t change it.

Mike, I look forward to your book. Why do you think Ellery fell out of favor? The traditional mystery still sells. Do you think Ellery just needs a reboot such as Sherlock got recently? Or, since the writers are not here to defend him, we should leave poor Ellery alone?

Back in 2005 Jon Breen wrote a brilliant essay for The Weekly Standard which celebrated Fred Dannay’s and Manny Lee’s centenaries and also tried to account for why Queen had been so completely forgotten. He offered five reasons. (1) Hard-boiled or noir detective fiction has become so closely identified with male authors like Hammett and Chandler, and classic formal puzzles (now called cozies) so closely linked to women authors like Christie and Sayers, that many great masters (as opposed to mistresses) of Golden Age detection—men like John Dickson Carr and Fred and Manny—have fallen between the cultural cracks. (2) Perhaps the Queen prose style has fallen out of favor and become a barrier to today’s readers. (3) There seems to be a “general critical prejudice against literary collaboration.” (4) The farming out of so much of the EQ product to ghosts in the 1960s was “disastrous in its effect on the Queen reputation.” (5) “Ellery Queen has fallen from public attention because our respect for intelligence, our cultural literacy, and our attention span are all in decline.” Jon nailed it. No one will ever do a better job of explaining how Ellery Queen has ceased to be a household name in our lifetimes. Which is why at the end of the 23rd and last chapter of my book I quote and paraphrase him as I do.

But look at the internet- I started, when I was 42, telling myself: look at it as a vast television. Most stuff on TV as well as the net is not for me, to put it mildly-but with the sheer expanse of the net, there is a lot to of interesting stuff, too. And THAT I use, and do NOT chat with bubbleheads and the like.
No facebook etc. for me. And STILL I would’nt like to miss the net.
Concerning young people, I don’t have kids, and thus not much contact with them, so what they do, is of no concern to me.
Looking at my own generation, people in their Fifties now, the lack of interest in literature is, and was there, too.
At a class reunion some years back, I found that my former mates, ALL full academics, lawyers, doctors, and so on, for the most part did read NOTHING apart from what is needed on the job, had forgotten their French and English……

Mike, I’m sure I will not be disappointed in your book. I think I’ve read just about all your books as they have come out and if the new Ellery Queen is like the Cornell Woolrich book, then that is great news.

“I believe the problem Ellery has is he existed in a era that today is not only dated but unappealing to young people today. The language, the treatment of women and minorities, the hero’s personality and beliefs, or at least the current perception of Ellery, all turn off many of today’s readers.”

But Michael, look at what many people see as the racism, sexism and homophobia in Chandler and the Crime Queens, yet “young people” still read them. Heck, some people are clamoring for the Dr. Fu Manchu books to be reprinted (which they are being now). People even still read Victorian adventure writers like H. Rider Haggard and you better some have objected to a lot of the attitudes in his books. But he’s still read and in print with Oxford University Pres,s Penguin, Modern Library, etc.

“Old people” don’t like a lot of of social attitudes in old crime fiction either, but they still read the books and enjoy them.

I agree with Mike Nevins, the world of Golden Age crime fiction has been bifurcated into the America, masculine, hardboiled on the one hand and the British, feminine, supposedly cozy on the other hand, meaning writers who don’t belong in the “right” categories fall through the cracks. There’s been an effort to remind people there actually were American women mystery writers, like Mary Roberts Rinehart, but in academic studies there’s been very little interest shown in non-hardboiled male writers, even though they outnumbered the women and included some of the most popular writers of the period. This is how you get The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction not even mentioning Ellery Queen or Gardner and barely mentioning Rex Stout (who still is in print!).

I don’t believe Ellery Queen will ever again be a “household name” (for that matter, what Golden Age writers really come close to this today–perhaps Chandler, Hammett and Christie–someone should polls them!), but his books should be in print and academic histories have an obligation to include him, because he is a very significant historical figure in the genre.

I’ll put in a plug for myself by mentioning that the Introduction and Chapter One of my Masters of the Humdrum Mystery, the study of John Street, Freeman Crofts and A. W. Stewart/J. J. Connington, explore this matter of the disappearance of the non-hardboiled GA male mystery writers in great detail.

“The teenagers in my era spent a comedically amount of time on the telephone or hanging out at some place with other teens. We were not home reading Ellery Queen. Books was something we had to do in school and most were eager to avoid.”

I started reading Agatha Christie when I was eight years old, then moved on to Arthur Conan Doyle. I read all the SH novels and stories before I was a teenager. I read AC all though junior high and high school. I did quit reading mysteries in college, but that’s because I was moving on to “literature” in my mind. I returned to mysteries in grad school. Of course, I don’t claim to be typical! Heavens! Perish the thought! 😉 Let’s face it, all of us here are pretty unusual in our intense bookishness.

I don’t believe we need concern ourselves with the people who don’t read, but rather with the people who read Golden Age mysteries but read only the Crime Queens. Could some of this readership–young, middle-aged, old, whatever–be convinced that you can be a GA writer worth reading even if you are not a Crime Queen? Or can some readers who read only modern crime fiction be attracted to anything in the Golden Age outside of the hardboiled/noir writers?

I do agree with you about the utility of Facebook and blogs. These are great ways of connecting with likeminded readers, who love the things you love. We have a Golden age mystery Facebook group, would love you have everyone.

It’s important to note that the treatment of minorities in Ellery Queen is good.
Ellery Queen was a card-carrying liberal. His books helped pioneer non-steroetyped black characters in mysteries.
People will have a pleasant surprise reading “The House of Darkness” and CAT OF MANY TAILS, and seeing the positive black people and pro-Civil Rights statements.

I know EQ’s first book gets criticized on modern grounds, but I can’t recall others raising major red flags. Heck, The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely probably have been more criticized on sensitivity grounds than the entire EQ corpus.

Of course stereotypes were pervasive enough back then that liberal as well as conservative writers fell prey to them. The advanced socialists Douglas and Margaret Cole, for example, have some offensive Jewish caricatures in their books, while in another book they denounce anti-Semitism!

#26. Curt. You and I talk to different people. I would not compare Marlowe and Queen as they are two completely different styles of fiction. But the Crime Queens and Ellery are worthy of compassion. Most of the Crime Queens exist due to a small loyal group of readers. Perhaps if Ellery had not made the mistakes he had in the sixties, the loyal base for him would be larger.

Of course, the exception is Agatha Christie, who today remains one of the top selling writers in mystery fiction.

Right now, old classics and genre fiction are flooding back into the market. Fu Manchu? How about Mysterious Press releasing Ellery Queen back out as e-books (oh, yeah, it only counts if a tree dies:)).

#28. The quote was referring to today’s youth texting and using cell phones and how we did the same only different.

My first reading experience was before I could crawl. My housewife mother would plop me down in whatever room she was in and give me a comic book or “Life” magazine. I would sit there and read the pictures and turn the pages. Mom was a former librarian so books have always been a part of my life.

My early tastes ran to humor comics and mysteries such as Encyclopedia Brown. My parents were into the traditional mysteries especially Christie. In my teens I discover the Continental Op and Paul Ernst’ The Avenger and abandoned the traditional mysteries. By now I had tried and rejected Ellery twice. I had finished a mail order course out of LSU for mystery fiction that heavily favored the traditional side.

I have never stopped reading and experimented with all the genres even literature, but mysteries have always been my favorite. I learned my tastes ran toward character driven, with humor, mysteries. Writers such as Gregory Macdonald, Vince Kohler, Norbert Davis and Ross Thomas are my favorites all others must compete.

Maybe that is why I enjoyed the ELLERY QUEEN TV series, it had a fun sense of humor and likable characters I never found in the books.

#29. I am referring to “The Roman Hat Mystery” and a review done at Tor.com (too long ago or I would link to it).

It is hard to critique Ellery’s character without deciding which one (I have learned here Ellery changed over the decades).

Again, I am no expert in traditional mysteries or Ellery Queen, only that they are not to my taste. But so what? The form is still worth trying to understand. That is why I am here. Having it all explained to me without me having to actually read them again.

I have been watching the TV series HARRY O, and Harry hates mystery fiction. I liked his comment (and should inspire some interesting response) to his opinion of Sherlock Holmes.

“Sherlock Holmes was a genius. With a little help from the guy who wrote him, he could deduce anything. But life is not as kind to detectives as A. Conan Doyle.”

Michael, I’m not dismissive e-books. Mysterious Press has brought back, what, two Ellery Queens? I hope they keep going, they’ve brought back thirteen Mignon Eberharts on Kindle. It would be nice if EQ could at least keep pace with Mignon Eberhart.

I myself when it comes to books prefer paper to plastic, so to speak (paper books don’t create a landfill problem), but if Kindle is the only way these books can be made accessible to the fans I will take it. I suspect e-books are the way of the future for most titles, although there will always be collectors of traditional books.

With e-books and print-in-demand this actually should be a great age for reprints of GA mysteries, but copyright laws are holding things back. If I could make a breakthrough with John Street’s literary agency, every one of the John Rhodes (and there are many of them!) could be back in print this year. I’ve helped make arrangements for fourteen GA mysteries by five different authors to make it back into print with a POD press this year. Without small publishers and the internet none of this would happen.

Curt, it is nice to see someone who also sees the future of POD. Small publishers don’t face the cost of set print runs and can succeed with books that appeal to a smaller audience. It also offers writers or their heirs less risk and affordable cost to keep their work in print.

The Made On Demand market for DVDs is growing and I suspect so will POD.

E-books are not as cheap to make as some believe. One of the added cost is creating the book in the many different formats of the many devices. Do you know if POD is cheaper?

I love e-books. I have over 1200 books spread over two Kindles, my Kindle for Mac, my Nook for Mac and various PDFs and other files. I have more print books, but most of them are in boxes lost deep in the jungle of my storage unit. They might as well not exist, at least I can read my e-books.

As for Mysterious Press and Ellery Queen, they have said they want to get the rights to publish more. I asked them about one in particular (I forget the title but Steve and others have recommended it to me for its humor) and they did not respond.

Jorge Luis Borges reviewed several detective novels by Ellery Queen. He considered “The Egyptian Cross Mystery”, “The Siamese Twin Mystery” and “The Chinese Orange Mystery” as books which belong to the best of the genre. But Borges judged “The Devil to Pay” as one of the most forgettable detective novels.

Excellent discussion on EQ. I’ll chime in with one more reason for his lack of staying power with new readers (or, for that matter, with re-readers like me): Brilliant as many of the puzzles are, the books are so poorly written that they have to be tolerated with gritted teeth until the solution chapter. And Ellery the detective is unintentionally ridiculous.

Christie, by way of comparison, is a stodgy, sometimes silly, but never less than competent writer — so she remains readable. And Poirot is *intentionally* ridiculous — Christie knew exactly when to gently lampoon him, whereas Queen the author seemed to regard Ellery the detective as some sort of paragon.

Michael, I too like Donald Sobol and Norbert Davis.
My favorite Ellery Queen book, CALENDAR OF CRIME, has a welcome current of humor and wit.

My own take on the Decline of EQ:
Educated people in the English speaking world have decided that there isn’t much substance in the mystery fiction published 1825-1970. And that it isn’t worth reading and you don’t have to know anything about it. Just read a handful of the top 12 authors, Sayers and Christie if you’re genteel, Chandler and Jim Thompson if you’re tough, and forget about the rest.

This view seems deeply engrained in literary people, academics, journalists, reviewers, and just about everyone with a college education in the US and Britain.
It is very hard to fight!

Counteracting this is my own belief:
That two types of old mysteries are major works of art:
1) Puzzle plot mysteries, such as impossible crimes – the kind written by Carr, Christie and Queen.
2) Scientific detective stories.

Josef and Mike Grost, thanks for the suggestions. If any of them make it to e-books, I will give them a try (I am trying to get rid of my warehouse of print books not add to it. It is harder than one would think).

Mike (in #36) I agree. The literature vs genre has been an absurd argument for centuries. But I don’t find the current bias as odd as the critical openness to all fiction that occurred around the 1920s to 1950s.

Mike Nevins (in #22) gave a good list from Jon Breen and I had doubts about only #5. The masses since before Galileo have never respected intelligence (usually distrusts it) nor cared about our cultural literacy.

I think all of you have a good handle on how academia’s abandonment of Ellery has affected the character.

But the masses rejection has occurred (I believe) because of such factors as a series of inferior books lead to the loss of the fan base, the loss of the creators (or new writers) to continue to write popular new stories, the perception of the character as dated, and the increase in choices to spend one’s leisure time.

Both puzzle plot mysteries and scientific detective stories still exist. You can find them on video games, books and television (see SHERLOCK). They are written by today’s Carrs and Queens. Don’t discount the video game from valid mysteries. If this generation is different from mine, it is they are more active, less likely to passively spend long hours sitting with a book and more likely to spend long hours sitting as they interact with a detective video game. There’s a thought, an Ellery Queen video game

One other thought. Whenever I pick up one of the Queen novels, I find that I can slip back in time and read it and enjoy it exactly as someone in the 30s or 40s would have.

And yet at the same time, somewhere in the back of my mind, I find myself wondering what a present day reader would make of it and what their reactions might be, with thoughts and conclusions that are not always as favorable as I’d like.

In considering why Ellery Queen is not so well known today as in days past, I think it’s important to look at the bigger picture of mystery-detective fiction in general.

Everybody knows Sherlock Holmes – because the descendants of Conan Doyle work golden time to keep the stories and the character alive in all media.

Same thing with Agatha Christie – her grandson, Mathew Prichard, is always announcing some new project or other, a new TV show, a new play or film, a new reprinting of all the books, some kind of tourist thing in England, et al.

Here in the USA, the academics still vigorously promote Hammett, Chandler, and to a lesser degree a few others.

The “loss of favor” that we’re lamenting here is more a matter of “out of sight, out of mind.”
Or in these cases, “out of print”.

We now live, for good or ill, in the Age Of Demographics.
The major rule that so many live by these days is:Only the Young count – because they’re the ones who Buy Things.
And the Young only care about that which concerns them Right Now.
Those of us who are Not Young anymore realize what horseradish this is – and anyone with an IQ in better than double digits has to be noticing that people are living longer/getting older these days.

But there’s another aspect of this that I don’t think anyone’s paid much attention to:People today – and not just young ones – have lost their sense of history.

I got interested in mysteries when I was a kid in high school – the mid-1960s.
This interest was met by stories in magazines (comic and otherwise), in books, in movies, and on TV – and of course old movies on TV.
Some of the stories I read and saw were new, but most of them were old – written and published before I was born – sometimes long before I was born.
And that was kind of what I enjoyed about them.
That’s part of the appeal, but not all of it.
The other part was connecting the past I was reading about to the present I was living in.
Thus, I could read about the 1890s Sherlock Holmes, the 1930s Philip Marlowe, the 1950s Ellery Queen, the 1960s 87th Precinct – I learned to tie it all together in my mind, as part of an overall flow (I’d never heard the word continuity, but that’s how I was thinking).
It was the same with movies and TV; I could see an old flick on the Late Late Show, and later spot some of the same actors on Perry Mason or Wagon Train … and for me it was all of a piece.
I suspect that it was much the same for many of you on this blog as well.

How this ties in to the current attitudes among the providers of our entertainments today:
The feeling seems to prevail that those who are young have no interest in that which is old – which is totally contrary to how I remember it when I was young.
But today’s Young seem to be buying into that, even as they’re not really being given much choice in the matter.

I have no facts and figures to cite, no studies to quote, nothing beyond my own highly limited observations.
But based on that admittedly limited perspective, it seems to me that when the Young get a look at Old Things … more often than not they get to actually like them.
You can’t like or dislike something you haven’t seen.
It would probably take some educating of the newer people, but how hard would that be (unless we found a way to make it difficult)?

I’m rambling here, and I admit it.
But I’ve never bought into the whole “dumbing down” argument, and as of now, this is my best response to that.

#41. Back in the late 70s when I was going to LSU there was a small campus movie theatre that showed old black and white movies. One night I went to see one of my favorite movies, KEY LARGO. The theatre held maybe 75 people. There was about a half a dozen college students and me. They laughed at the film and got drunk. It was all a joke to them.

Last week or so, SINGING IN THE RAIN played in one of the biggest movie theatre in Baton Rouge. It was sold out and turning people away. There were people of all ages, they laughed where they were supposed to, cheered and had as great of time as the original audiences did.

I have lived in Kansas, Louisiana and Los Angeles and the difference between the coasts and middle America make me wonder if I am on the same planet. It is impossible to ignore the media and government attempts to convince us life is terrible and we are all doomed. If I wasn’t a history buff who had read the same views preached in every era of the past, I’d might not be so optimistic.

Of course today’s youth seeks new and different, that is normal. Look how music changed by decade. Look at mysteries from puzzles to pulps to Chandler to today.

The Age of only Youth counts began in the 1960s when youth was the mass audience. It was just we were the youth then and didn’t mind. Demographic make sense when used properly but today’s media really don’t explain them well.

Demographics favor youth because that is when our tastes and opinions are formed. As we become young adults we choose between Pepsi and Coke, Budwiser and Miller, Chevy or Ford.

How much of what you enjoy reading was discovered when you were young? Is any ad going to convince you to try today’s popular mysteries genre of romantic suspense? So why bother, and focus on those who are too inexperienced to have made their decision.

The 18-49 (the last number keeps getting larger) or the newer 25-54 is based on who has the most disposable income. We live in a capitalist society, whoever has the most money rules.

Happily, the internet is making it easier to find the small but loyal consumers. E-books have eliminated problem costs such as print runs and storage of inventory, so books with a smaller market are now possible from a business bottom line. This means Mysterious Press can afford to offer Ellery Queen to the small group of customers willing to pay a few bucks.

If you go to youtube, and go for older music, from 90s, 80s, down to swing, blues, folk,that was recorded in the 30s, you almost ALWAYS find some young person, even a kid, who LOVES this music.
In their comments, they express mostly astonishment, or rather, the feeling of having stumbled upon a treasure.
When I was a kid, we had some radioshows that aired shellacks,swing music, and I loved it.
So- there could be money in this,moneylenders of the temple, if only you knew.

Since I wrote yesterday’s rantlet, I took some time to read some of the other comments a little more closely.

Some of the observations about “the Queen prose style” seem not to take into account that there were several “Queen prose styles”.

Mike Nevins posits four different and distinct periods in the EQ fiction, and if you don’t read your Queens in strict order of publication (as I didn’t when I first read them as a kid), they all would seem to be written by different people.

As a ’60s teenager, the first Queen stories I read were the more recent ones; my very first was the short story “The Gettysburg Bugle” in the June 1965 issue of EQMM. That year EQMM was rerunning the Calendar Of Crime series, which was more or less contemporary (10-15 years old or thereabouts), and 14 year-old me had no trouble with it at all.
This started me buying the books, which were being reissued by various publishers, not in sequence. Over time, I picked up on the fact that the older novels, dating from the 1930s, were written in a denser, more verbose style than the later ones. This is where I learned the lesson of adjusting expectations for each story I read; it was simple enough to check the copyright date before starting the story.
This is not at all unlike watching an old movie on TV. Most of what was available for viewing in the ’60s could date back as far as thirty years before, so as a viewer I had to learn about perspective and context.

Those last two ideas I mentioned –perspective and context – are nearly foreign concepts to newer generations, who believe that the world came into being at the time of their birth.
To enjoy any work of fiction you ought to be aware if when and where it came from. Too many people nowadays simply don’t want to take the time to learn something.

As applied to Ellery Queen, I’ll admit that I find the later EQ novels and shorts (post-Halfway House) more accessible than the very early ones, so if I’m recommending them to those younger than I am, that’s where I’d go.

Personal note: Double, Double, written in 1950, is a personal favorite of mine, mainly because of several passages that I like to read aloud to people. Specifically, three passages where Ellery has to deal with Francis O’Bannon and his relationship with Malvina Prentiss. I always found these sections to be (to use modern terminology) LOL, and most people that I’ve read them to (even younger ones) seem to respond in that manner (the final passage, from the end of the novel, sometimes goes all the way to LMAO).
My personal experience; yours may vary.

So that’s two books I’m waiting for – Mike Nevins’s and Jeffrey Marks’s.
I hope not for so long – those of us in the target demo aren’t getting any younger, you know.

The irony of this discussion is that in Mike’s original ROYAL BLOODLINE his thesis is that EQ had survived for so long (since 1929) exactly BECAUSE the character and the situations changed with the times … That was also the contention of Fred Dannay and Manfred Lee. Without the creators, however, the times got beyond the creation.